#xenakis

Diamanda Galas called this the most terrifying song she had ever heard. This song uses the UPIC composition system - it essentially translates shapes into sound. The Y axis refers to sound frequency, and the X axis time. Basically, instead of using even a microtonal scale, you have note continuums, which was also used by composers like Ligeti. The result is indeed one of the most terrifying and powerful things I've ever heard - and also stands as excellent visual art too. If you want to compose like this (I myself occasionally use something similar for graphic scores), there is a modern recreation available here. You can even get it for iphone/ipad. I'll likely be using it more as I learn it. Anyway I love Xenakis. And not just because he is one of the greatest and most innovative composers of the 20th century. And not just because I owe so much of what I do to him, especially as he went into outright noise music. And not just the fact the was a fantastic architect. But also the fact he had his face disfigured fighting british imperialism, and was part of the armed resistance against fascism during world war 2.

Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10 (1967) [Composed 1953]

Sometimes you have to Google the dumbest things to find what you want ...

After writing about bombastic classical works every metal-head loves such as Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” and Holst’s “Mars, The Bringer of War,” I decided to Google “classical” + “heavy metal” in search of other “serious” works that might appeal to my high-energy, higher-decibel sensibilities, and that’s how I discovered Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

A native of St. Petersburg, born in 1906, Shostakovich was considered the “boy wonder” of Soviet classical music until his 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, upset none other than Joseph Stalin and saw Dmitri sweating, not just for his art, but for his very life over the decades that followed.

But he fought back the only way he could: via his inalienable musical genius, at least until 1948, when Stalin took umbrage yet again, stripped Dmitri of his professorship at the Moscow Conservatory, and forced him to shelve his more audacious compositions for fear of further reprisals.

So when the old tyrant finally bit the dust in the winter of 1953, Shostakovich was compelled to put pen to paper that spring and summer, emerging in relatively short order with his Tenth Symphony, described by noted critic Ted Libbey as “a score meant to settle a score.”

Indeed, the lengthy first movement seeks to express the composer’s emotions in the face of terror and oppression, opening with brooding, troubled desolation before exploding into powerless fury before descending yet again into hopeless despondency.

But the second movement scherzo is anything but a joke (“scherzo” is Italian for “joke,” of course), being that it’s a musical portrait of Stalin himself: frantic, ruthless, intense, and incredibly violent as it thrashes to a finish in under five minutes.

After this onslaught, you’ll be given a chance to collect yourself during the third movement’s contrast of a lonely, mysterious horn against tentative dance motifs, and a fourth movement that conveys Dmitri’s relief, disbelief, and ultimately joy over finally outliving Stalin’s scorn and censorship. 

So, was Dmitri Shostakovich the Tony Iommi of classical music, or something? 

Of course not, but based on what I’ve sampled of his other works, and especially his famous Fifth Symphony, the composer who passed away in 1975 sure loved blasting his listeners with some powerful sounds.

And while I’m not about to say, “move over, Stravinsky,” Libbey does proclaim in his essential (and oh-so-helpful to these blogs) NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection  that Shostakovich’s Tenth is “one of the undisputed classical music masterpieces penned in the second half of the 20th Century.”

So thanks, Google, I guess...

A Short History of Granular Synthesis – Part 1

When we look at the way how granular sound processors, namely granular synthesis VSTs and other granular sound processing software, are used, we might think this technique is practised either by quite old so called “serious” electronic musicians, or by quite young artists and producers, who are interested in spectacular effects generated with free granular synths, or with expensive graintable synthesizers, doing granular sampling, or using hardware granular synths. Either way it looks like being a quite young approach to working with sound. Being asked my oldest grandson told me that it was – maybe – 10 years ago, when musicians started to process sound on a granular basis, whereas one of my sons-in-law thought to know it better, when he claimed, that it was in the 1940s, when someone – he didn´t know the name – started using granular techniques with sound.

Both were terribly wrong – and so was I before I started preparing for this book. (see also “In the World of Grains” here: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/332 )

The idea of understanding sound as a more or less organised aggregation of short grains was firstly uttered by the Dutch philosopher and scientist Isaac Beeckman in the first decade of the 17th century, more than 400 years ago!

But without the technical requirements and conditions to make musical use of the idea, all thoughts and thinking about a possibly granular structure of sound vanished into oblivion for more than 330 years.

It wasn´t a musician nor a philosopher who revived the notion of sound as a cluster of grains – probably without knowing about Beeckman at all.

During the first half of the 20th century the development of the quantum theory gained speed. Leading physicists like Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others smashed the notion of things like time and space as a continuum, and proved, that time, space and even reality as a whole has a corned, a grained, a granular structure, with these “corns”, these “grains” called “quanta”. Quantum physics was the new rock´n´roll of the scientists.

And therefore it might not be that astonishing, that – in 1946 - it was the physicist and mathematician Dennis Gabor, who came up with what would lead to the modern granular processing of sound of today.

He even constructed a number of electro-mechanical machines producing “quanta of sound”, as he called them. These machines were huge “monsters” reminding of cinematographs.

But his most important contribution to the further development of working with grains of sound was his research concerning the influence of the length of a grain and the frequency of its content on how the human ear conceives them. These researches laid the ground for bringing the matter from the realm of physics to the area of art and music.

Still – it would last 13 more years (1959/1960) before grains appeared in a piece of musical art, and it was the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, who let the world hear the first composition, which was – partly – based on granular techniques: Analogique A-B.

Without going into too many details here in this short brief, there shall be mentioned the following at least: Xenakis recorded a string orchestra, cut the tape into certain tiny parts, rearranged them, glued the snippets together again, added the sound from electronic tone generators to the rearranged snippets, and re-rcorded the whole thing. Then he let the orchetra play a small part of the previously recorded piece. Then the orchestra stops playing and gets a musical answer from the tape. The answers from the – let me call it – composed grains get more and more perfect. It seems, that the tape sound undergoes a kind of learning process. Then both, the acoustical instruments as well as the tape, the grains and the electronically produced sounds play together.

Imagine, what an immense amount of working hours and how detailed a compositional plan it will have needed to work with tape snippets of grain lengths in such a manner!

Later – in 1971 – Xenakis published “Formalized Music”, a book in which he layed out a musical theory of how to compose using grains of sound.

But in the meantime – between 1960 and 1971 – some other interesting things happened. Things, which would accelerate the development of granular sound machines and software.

… to be continued.